Category - Amiga

Once again, just in time for some weekend reading, the latest issue #137 of Amiga Future was posted through my letterbox this morning. I was reassured to see that it’s packed to the gills with great content as usual with a particular focus on reviews this time.

Amiga Future Front Cover

There’s several game reviews including Powerglove Reloaded, The Kiwi’s Tale, Trap runner and more. A review of SMBFS which allows the Amiga to access NAS drives using the Samba File System (might do an article about setting this up in the future). There’s a great review of Amiga Forever 8 from Cloanto, latest Amiga news, Aminet uploads and plenty more to read. The coverdisk includes a full release of NemacIV plus lots of other goodies too.

I also received a notification that my 12 month subscription was about to expire, certainly doesn’t seem like 12 months since I last renewed! Anyway, at under £63 (€69) for another 12 months (including coverdisks) it was an easy decision to renew it.

Here’s a little peak at some of the pages of Amiga Future #137. If you’d like to purchase a copy then take a look here.

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Hibernated 1 – A New Text Adventure

2nd March 2019

Amiga, Commodore 64, Gaming

1 Comment

Been waiting for this particular game to arrive for what feels like an eternity after having pre-ordered it last year. As of today that wait is finally over! Hibernated 1 – This Place is Death is now on my desk waiting to be played! 🙂

This isn’t a review as I’ve not had time to play the game yet, just a look at the physical edition and what’s inside it. Hopefully once I’ve completed it (always the optimist) I’ll write one.!

Amiga 3.5″ Disk & MicroSD Card

Which format?

I deliberated over whether to get the game on the Commodore 64 or Amiga for a while before ordering. In the end the Amiga won out due to it being able to display a greater number of characters per screen row. Given this is a text adventure I thought that was the most important consideration. However the beauty of this release is that although I chose the Amiga, this only affects the physical media the game ships with. On the MicroSD card are digital versions of ALL of the supported formats, including the Commodore 64. The other formats on the card are; Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Spectrum and IBM PC along with some bonus stuff like concept art.

Eight Feet Under

An extra bonus is that a digital copy of the spin-off game, ‘Eight Feet Under’ is included – you can download it from itch.io and again you have the same choice of formats as above. You can also choose to get Hibernated 1 digitally if you like, it’s available here and you can name your own price.

A look at what’s inside the box

Box Contents

Inside the box there are plenty of goodies to enjoy, here’s a quick rundown:

A5 full colour game manual
A3 full colour poster
Game on physical disk
Digital version of the game on MicroSD card (in a snazzy Hibernated case)
Password to download ‘Eight Feet Under’ from itch.io
Terran Alliance round cloth patch
Stickers
Adverts for some other poly.play games

Couple of screenshots

Here’a quick look at the loading screen and the opening screen to the game.

Open eyes… 😉

Loading Screen

Open eyes…….

CD32 Scene Issue 2 – Out now!

7th February 2019

Nearly six months after its debut, CD32 Scene Issue 2 is finally out. It’s lost the coverdisk, it’s a little thinner but it’s also cheaper too. Best of all I’m happy to report that the quality of the writing has vastly improved. It’s not perfect and there are a few printing errors near the front but it no longer spoils the content of the magazine.

Reviews

Speaking of content… Review wise we’ve got Zerosphere, Heroes of Gorluth, Tiger Claw and Power Glove. There’s a look at some of the recent PD releases and the next part of the A-Z of CD32 games.

A look at recent PD releases

There’s also an interesting overview of expansion cards available for the CD32 (both old and new), news, an interview with Richard Löwenstein and some game previews.

Expanding the CD32

As the author is quick to acknowledge, the CD32 scene is quite small at the moment and there isn’t a massive amount of new content that can be covered. However I enjoyed everything CD32 Scene Issue 2 had to offer and think it was well worth the £3.99 asking price. I feel it’s worth pointing out that most of the games featured work on regular Amigas too, so even if you don’t yet own a CD32, the content is still mostly relevant.

Stop that Amiga drive clicking noise!

31st January 2019

29 Comments

Ah, the Amiga’s Drive clicking noise… For some this is the Amiga’s heartbeat, for others like me, it’s a source of increasing irritation the longer I have to listen to it. The same was true back in the 80’s and it’s still true now, especially as I have 4 drives that all click in unison! It only occurs when the drives are empty so you could stick a disk in each one to shut them up, but I’ve never been fond of that solution.

Originally back in the 80’s I installed a ‘Noclick’ program off a magazine coverdisk that silenced my drive. Sadly I no longer have either so I had to find something else. The good news is that there are quite a few on Aminet (yes Aminet is still alive and kicking!). I tried several before finding one that would reliably silence all my drives. By the way, as a rule of thumb – if any ‘noclick’ program doesn’t silence your drive after about 10-20 seconds after running it then don’t use it – it’s incompatible with your drive type and could possibly damage it over time.

There are quite a few ‘noclick’ programs to choose from but not all worked for me…

The one that worked for me is:

noclick20_usr.lha – http://aminet.net/util/cdity/noclick20_usr.lha

For the record I have four drives (1x internal Chinon drive, 2x external Roctec drives and 1x Gotek with sound mod) and it silenced all of them.

Here’s the contents of the noclick20_usr.lha archive decompressed to my Ram Disk.

Like most things on Aminet it is compressed using LHA so use something like Directory Opus to unpack it to your RAM Disk. Once there you can copy it to a location of your choice to run as and when you need it. If you want it to run all the time then copy it to your WBStartup directory which will cause it to run automatically every time your boot your Amiga up.

Copy NoClick to your WBStartup directory to have it run each time you boot up your Amiga.

How to Format an SD Card for Amiga to PC File Transfer

26th January 2019

Amiga, How to's

16 Comments

Introduction

The whole benefit, to me at least, of having an SD card reader on my Amiga 500 is to allow me to transfer files to and from a PC. In order to do this the SD card needs to be formatted in such a way as to be readable by both systems. Turns out it’s not too hard to do. This post will show you exactly how to achieve this and also serve as a reminder for myself in the future when I inevitably forget what I did!

Stuff You’ll Need

I used a MicroSD card for this task but the process would be the same for a regular full-size SD card too. I have personally got this working with a 32GB card and more recently with a 200GB MicroSD card! Please note that I have a Vampire Card in my Amiga (which has a MicroSD card slot) and use Apollo OS (Coffin R34 – Amiga OS 3.9). This solution is based on that scenario. If you want to find out more about my Vampire upgrade please read about it here and adding an SD card reader here.

By the way, this should work with most SD cards you may have lying around. I used to link directly to the card I bought but time stays still for no man and it is no longer available. However this 32GB MicroSD Card is almost identical.

Formatting the card on a PC

First things first – the card MUST be formatted on the PC, not the Amiga. The format we need to use is FAT32 as this is easily readable on the Amiga whilst still being compatible with the PC. The main disadvantage with FAT32 is it has a 4GB file size limit but this should never really be an issue with the Amiga as most of the files we will be dealing with are only a few MB in size.

I’m using Windows 10 which annoyingly doesn’t have a native FAT32 format option (only NTFS or exFAT). After searching around I settled on this free 3rd party FAT32Format app to get the job done. If you already have some FAT32 formatting software then by all means go ahead and use that. If not then this one is free and very simple to use, you don’t even need to install it, just run the executable.

Run the .exe file you just downloaded and make absolutely sure that the drive letter under ‘Drive’ matches that of your SD card.
Leave the ‘Allocation unit size’ at the default setting.
Give your card a name under the ‘Volume label’ heading but keep it short. No more than 11 characters and avoid using any symbols. In the example below I called mine ‘AMIGA SD’.
Ensure ‘Quick format’ is ticked (otherwise it’ll take forever) and then click ‘start’.
When the format warning box pops up click on ‘OK’.

View after the card has been formatted

A few moments later you should have a nicely formatted FAT32 SD card! As you can see from the image below it has been correctly formatted as FAT32 and shows approx 29GB of free space. It’s perfectly normal to lose some space when formatting disks so don’t worry that it doesn’t exactly match the capacity of your card.

SD card properties viewed in Windows after formatting.

Configuring the Amiga side of things

Now it’s time to take the SD card over to your Amiga for the next stage of the process. This is going to involve editing a DOSDriver on the Amiga with the parameters needed to successfully read and write to your SD card. Unless you’ve been messing around with SD Cards already there won’t be an SD0 device in your Amiga’s SYSTEM:DEVS/DOSDrivers directory. Fear not though because you can finding it lurking in the STORAGE directory (SYSTEM:Storage/DOSDrivers) waiting to be put to good use. Find the SD0 file and open it in your editor of choice, for me that’s the one built into Directory Opus. Edit the file so that the contents look exactly like the one in the image below:

SD0 DOSDriver File contents (shown in Directory Opus Editor)

Slightly clearer copy of the config (pasted into Wordworth to make it clearer to read)

Save your changes to SD0 and close the editor. This next part is particularly crucial otherwise, despite all your efforts thus far, the card will still be unreadable. You need to move the file OUT of SYSTEM:Storage/DOSDrivers and place it INTO the actual SYSTEM:DEVS/DOSDrivers directory. Doing this will force the Amiga to read the config on boot and enable it to recognise an SD card when present. You can do this in a number of different ways but again my preferred method is Directory Opus.

Edited SD0 correctly placed in DOSDrivers Directory

Once you’ve done this, assuming the card is already inserted, reboot your Amiga (CTRL-A-A) and when Workbench has loaded back up you should see a lovely SD card icon on the screen similar to the one below.

SD0 Icon on Workbench

The next image shows a 200GB MicroSD card working and you can see the Amiga recognising the card capacity as 183.3G.

200GB MicroSD card working on the Amiga. 183.3GB of space 🙂

Here’s a regular 32GB card working recognised as being 29.1GB capacity. If you remember from earlier on that reported size is pretty much the same as how Windows saw it.

32GB MicroSD card working on the Amiga. 29.1GB of space.

SD Card Amiga <-> PC Usage

I find my Amiga/PC formatted SD card incredibly useful, not only for transferring files between systems but also for storing CD’s on. I don’t have a CD drive on my Amiga but I do on my PC. Any Amiga CD’s I get, such as the Amiga Future Coverdisks, I simply copy into a folder on the card and they’re instantly available on the Amiga. The 200GB card is particularly useful for this purpose as it can potentially hold nearly 300 CD’s plus all my other stuff.

I have noticed that SD cards work a little differently on the Amiga. You can’t just insert one and expect it to appear in Workbench. The card needs to be present in the card slot before you boot your Amiga up. Likewise, if you remove it, it will still show the icon on your Workbench. For these reasons I’d recommend always inserting the card whilst your Amiga is off and not removing the card until you’ve shut down your Amiga just to be safe. If I ever find a way around this I’ll update this post.

Anyway, I hope this post proves useful for a few people, I know it took me quite a lot of stumbling around before I brought all the parts of the puzzle together!

Tales of Gorluth (New Amiga Purchase)

16th January 2019

Couple of new game purchases arrived for my Amiga today. Tales of Gorluth and Heroes of Gorluth. These are both brand new games that I freely admit I’d never heard of until stumbling onto them a few weeks ago.

These are traditional 16-bit RPG style games with a mix of top-down and platform play, a bit like the early Zelda games. Although the games are on CD, you don’t actually need a CD drive on your Amiga to play them thankfully (you can copy the files onto a memory card). Looking forward to giving these a go soon! I got them from here.

Amiga Future #136

11th January 2019

Just in time for some winter weekend reading in front of the fire – Amiga Future #136 dropped onto my doormat this morning! Looks like it’s going to be a very interesting read as usual. Here’s a quick peak at some of the content…

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Powerglove Reloaded and Tiger Claw

9th January 2019

31 Comments

Just received Powerglove Reloaded and Tiger Claw in the post from RGCD and they both look absolutely awesome. The new style of packaging makes them look really premium and they’re going to look amazing displayed on my shelves.

Comparison with standard DVD case

As you can see from the photo above, the boxes are much wider and ever-so-slightly taller than a standard DVD case. This allows more space for cool artwork on the spine and of course extra room for goodies inside!

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Both boxes were crammed with extras including: the game on 3.5″ floppy disk, the game on CD (with jewel case and inserts), instruction manual, postcards, stickers, pin badges and a very useful spare 3.5″ disk label to put on your own backup copy of the game! Both games also came with glorious A3 colour posters featuring the game artwork on one side and maps of the games on the other. Tiger Claw also came with a really cool rubber shuriken. Even though it’s made of rubber it’s still pretty pointy though!

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I already own Powerglove Reloaded and Tiger Claw on the Commodore 64 (digitally) but these Amiga releases just looked too good for me to pass up. At £16 (or just £15 without the floppy disk) I think they’re an absolute bargain too and I could not be happier with my purchase.

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I was also relieved to find that both games loaded and played flawlessly off their respective floppy disks on my heavily modified Amiga 500 computer. Happy days!

Amiga Future Issue 135

15th November 2018

Amiga, Retro

Plenty of reading material this week as in addition to K&A Plus 11, Amiga Future 135 is also out now. This edition is packed with all the latest news from the entire Amiga scene…

Amiga Future 135 News pages

…including an in depth look at Gamescom 2018 that took place in Cologne back in August this year.

Gamescom 2018 Feature

There are also plenty of reviews of both old and new Amiga games including the newly released ‘Extended Collector’s Edition’ of Rocket Ranger.

Rocket Ranger Extended Collector’s Edition Review

A little late for me personally (having installed this about 6 months ago) but still of great interest, is a detailed review of MorphOS 3.11, the latest iteration of the long running replacement Amiga OS.

MorphOS 3.11 Review

There’s plenty more to read about besides the few things I’ve highlighted already so if you are interested in finding out more about this long running Amiga magazine take a look here.

K&A Plus Issue 11

15th November 2018

Amiga, Commodore 64, Retro

This magazine is only published a couple of times a year but is always packed with great content and K&A Plus Issue 11 is no exception. This is probably the biggest magazine both in terms of thickness and content there is for the Commodore range of machines in 2018, packing in a whopping 81 pages and none of them are filled by adverts!

Single Button Games & Exploding Fish Reviews

This issue has a fairly even split of content between the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers which is fantastic for me as I actively support both formats. There’s news, reviews, tutorials and retrospective articles covering both machines and even some stuff for the Vic 20 and the post Amiga MorphOS and AROS systems.

Mini reviews of C64 Racing Games.

The star of the whole issue for me is the included (if you pay a little extra for it) 5.25″ Coverdisk featuring a brand new game for the Commodore 64 – ‘Tower of Rubble’. This is the first 5.25″ Coverdisk I have seen since Commodore Disk User ceased publication back in 1991.

Tower of Rubble Coverdisk

There’s loads of content, far too much to list but some of the highlights for me are: A look into the Spy vs Spy franchise, H. R. Giger’s Dark Seed, reviews of ‘Retro Radio Stations’, an article about the pro’s and cons of modifying/upgrading retro machines and an ‘Amiga in your pocket’ tutorial showing you step by step how to convert a windows tablet into a portable Amiga!!!

A look at Dark Seed on the Amiga

If you want to find out more, or order yourself a copy, head on over to the Komoda & Amiga Plus website. The magazine is produced in Poland and shipping to the UK only takes a few days.

Worthy

5th October 2018